Alphabet Soup is a project which attempts to determine a number of things about the shapes of letters in several different writing systems. First, it hypothesizes a set of basic building blocks that all letters are built up from. Second, it hypothesizes a set of rules, a grammar or syntax, which defines how those pieces combine to make different letters. It can generate individual letters, randomize letters in an input string to create weird but readable text, or generate random strings of symbols.

acoc is a regular-expression based colour formatter for programs that display output on the command-line. It works as a wrapper around the target program, executing it and capturing the stdout stream. Optionally, stderr can be redirected to stdout, so that it, too, can be manipulated. acoc then applies matching rules to patterns in the output and applies colours to those matches.

This HOWTO explains how to extract embedded bitmaps (sbits) out of CJK TrueType fonts, generating high quality bit-mapped fonts for X11. Included are several encoding maps for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean encodings. Most CJK TrueType fonts include embedded bitmaps for 10, 12, 14, 16, 18 and 20 point sizes.

The ClearlyU family of bitmap fonts provides a set
of 12 pt, 100 dpi proportional BDF fonts with many
of the glyphs needed for Unicode text (including
numerous alternate glyphs and other glyphs not
encoded in Unicode that are necessary to actually
display certain scripts, e.g., Arabic or
Devanagari).